Have a website blog that you are proud and passionate about? Well, so do 600 million others.
That is the number of active blogs as of 2021, only set to increase in the upcoming years. Blogging is a great way to build an engaged audience, regardless of your business goals. If you are starting a new business, blogs can be a great way to build a potential customer base. Or if you have already launched your brand, and are actively posting blogs to attract website traffic, you are on the right track.
But there is doing things, and then there is doing things right. We all aspire to be doing the latter, and there are many ways to accomplish that. Here are a few powerful ways that you can use to grow your website blog in 2021:
Emails have been a staple part of marketing campaigns across industries, however, if you are looking to promote your website blog, it is even more of an important tool. One of the primary things you need to do for successful email marketing is building a well-curated email list to which the campaigns will be directed.
Building a strong email campaign requires you to come up with catchy subject lines, polishing your email content, and including videos as well as attractive visuals within the email body. Positioning effective CTA buttons within the content can be another great way to go about creating an impactful email campaign.
Regardless of whether you are an individual blogger or a brand that is trying to promote your website blog, providing social proof can go a long way. In today’s day and age, nobody wants to give even a minute of their time to something that they do not truly care about. So how will you make them care? By giving them reasons to, and letting them know just how much people are appreciative of your content.
Posting testimonials and highlighting the various publications where you have been featured can be one of the greatest ways to achieve this. Moreover, you can also provide social proof on other digital channels by featuring some of the most encouraging and positive comments that you have received from your readers. This will let potential readers know that you are a credible and informative source.
Another important way in which you can create highly impactful email campaigns is by using impactful visuals within the email content. Visual content can increase reader engagement and can help them process the information faster and in a more concrete manner. You can use dynamic GIFs within the content or even give your CTA buttons an interesting visual twist to improve the readability of your email.
Even within your blog, you should integrate as many visuals as possible and then link back to them through your emails. Moreover, it is also important to optimize the images that are being used within the emails so that they are more effective in targeting the relevant audience. You should also be wary of the text-to-image ratio and ensure that it does not get skewed in the process of adding visuals within the content.
This is an age-old trick that was followed offline, which is equally effective in marketing website blogs. It is important to acknowledge that your blog does not exist in a vacuum and is present within a community of blogs that may be posting in a similar niche.
The thought that you want to boost growth for your blog all by yourself - with your own blood, sweat, and tears sounds aspirational. But the reality, in this case, is much simpler. Regardless of the niche of your blog, there are plenty of bloggers who will happily share your link on their website and give your website blog that much-needed momentum. Be present and active in the relevant blogging communities so that you can progressively boost the growth of your blog.
Monitoring your analytics is one of the definite ways to ensure that your blog consistently performs well. There are several tools and applications that you can use to keep track of your analytics. Google Analytics among others is a great tool for constantly tracking your blog performance in terms of the number of visitors, the time they spend on your blog, and the actions they take on your blog.
You can create the entire customer journey and all the points at which customers are engaging the most, which can help you tweak your blog for maximum engagement and performance. Keeping a check of your analytics will also help you ensure that you are able to deliver according to the expectations of your readers. You can also get additional guidance online on how to use the right tools to drive your SEO through analytics and other parameters.
The most compelling part about using data in your blog is that it helps create a compelling story backed with real evidence. The team at Solitaire Bliss is a good example of how to successfully leverage data. They have blog posts that talk about how they have measured and improved employee engagement and customer support. The data engages readers and gives them confidence in what in the ideas they’re presented.
While we have discussed the organic means to bring traffic to your website blog thus far, paid advertisements are an equally viable option for that extra boost. You can increase the reach of your blog and ensure that potential readers who are looking to engage with content in your niche, are able to reach your blog.
Moreover, there are multiple options for advertising your blog including paid advertisements on social media platforms, targeted display ads via Google among many more. If you think paid advertisements can be an expensive option, you are mistaken.
Paid advertisements work for different budgets and varied goals. For a smaller business blog, you can start with a basic price range, by targeting a limited geographical segment or keywords. As you start reaping the fruits of these advertisements, you can slowly increase your budget to meet your needs.
Affiliate marketing as a term has been thrown around quite a bit lately, and for good reason. In this kind of marketing individuals or brands that want to monetize their blog can earn by providing recommendations of products/services by other brands. Under this model, companies reward you, the affiliate, by paying for each customer or visitor that converts as a result of your marketing efforts. You just need to find the right high-paying affiliate programs that pay well in long run.
If you have a blog that talks predominantly about tech and gadget trends or performance, you have the perfect opportunity to become an affiliate for major tech brands. Since word-of-mouth is still a powerful strategy to increase brand awareness and performance, brands are usually looking for affiliates (also known as influencers now) to come on board. In this case, brands are also likely to promote your post, thus bringing more traffic to your website blog.
Many website blogs commit the grave mistake of keeping the comment section inactive or not adding a comment section at all. This works only if you are publishing thought leadership articles, with the goal of sharing your expertise and knowledge with others. But if you are blogging to gain traction and want to make your blog an interactive experience, keeping the comments section active is important.
Not only this, as a website blog owner, you should constantly monitor your comments section and seek feedback from your readers. Even if some of them are negative, they can give you a lot of insights on areas of improvement, and what the readers are expecting from your blog. What’s more, comment sections are great for increasing reader engagement and if you implement their feedback, those users are bound to stay as loyal readers. Win-win!
Social media. Yes, we know. You are tired of hearing it be the solution for all your problems. But hear us out.
In 2020, social media platforms did quite well. In fact, they were some of the few companies that saw a surge in their customers. As of now, 3.9 billion actively use social media, a 10% increase from the previous year. Now, can you ignore that kind of impetus? We didn’t think so.
Social media channels can be great promotional tools for marketing your website blog and take it a few notches higher. Higher social media engagement directly translates to an increase in website traffic as well as engagement on your blog, which is after all, what you are looking for, right. With the right social media experts on your team, you can truly do wonders for your blog performance.
The popular adage goes: Make improvements, not excuses.
It rings true for every possible field and area of your business. You can give yourself 10 excuses to put your website improvement on the back-burner, but that is not advisable. Websites get outdated very fast, as you know. If you look at a website that has been constructed a decade back, you will not find it that attractive or well-designed. This happens only because technologies keep evolving. By constantly improving your website, you will be able to keep your readers engaged, as well as improve your SEO rankings.
The aesthetics of your website, after all, require just as much diligence and care as your content.
It is easy to fall into a rut and keep posting blogs, hoping that they will do better. But a more proactive approach would be to take decisive steps that will definitely increase your website traffic, as well as the reach that you are able to attain for your blog. By implementing simple steps like the ones mentioned in this article, you can definitely start observing a drastic improvement in your blog performance.
Content marketer by day and book nerd by night, Momina works at Mailmunch as a Marketing Communications Specialist. Momina eats, sleeps, and breathes content marketing. Her expertise ranges from ideation to production to distribution of content, thanks to 4+ years of experience in the B2B content marketing sphere.
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